Stéphane Dion may be taking time to mull his political future, but Canadians have already said good-bye to the Liberal leader, according to new research.

Ensight Canada, a consulting firm, will on Friday release the results of focus groups it conducted on Wednesday night, less than 24 hours after the polls closed.

The research suggests Canadians are focused on the economy, happy to have another minority government and anxious for Parliament to get back to work.

Absent from participants’ discussions of their priorities and expectations for the next Parliament was any mention of Mr. Dion, who saw his party lose 19 seats in this week’s election and tumble to record lows in electoral support.

“It’s over for him,” said Jaimie Watt, one of Ensight’s principals.

“People are not angry, but they’ve moved on. They’ve said good-bye to the point where, when they talk about the leaders, they talk about Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper, they talk about Mr. [Gilles] Duceppe, they talk about Mr. [Jack] Layton, but they don’t mention Mr. Dion unless prompted.”

Newspaper reports on Thursday morning suggested Mr. Dion would step down later in the day, but Liberal party officials quashed those rumours.

While the party ponders its next move, voters have dismissed Mr. Dion as a nice but ineffectual guy, said Robin Sears, another Ensight principal.

“People spoke about him the same way they discuss a family member or a friend-of-a-friend who they know is completely inadequate in some respect of their ability to do their job, but they don’t really want to get into the details so they just stop mid-sentence instead of enumerating all the defects,” Mr. Sears said. “It’s like they wanted him to be more successful, they respected him as a man, a politician, an intelligent person but it just didn’t work out.”

He added later: “If, by some sort of fate or ego, Mr. Dion would hang around for a year, I think you could judge that quiet sort of ‘thank you very much, but it’s over’ would go to a nastier place,” Mr. Sears said.

While Mr. Dion was rejected as nice but incompetent, voters saw Mr. Harper as uncompassionate but the best option to manage the economy.

“Mr. Harper was best of all the choices available but not sufficiently best that they wanted to give him a majority,” Mr. Sears said.

Participants across the country also expressed irritation with Mr. Harper for calling the election in the first place.

“There is a lot of anger about the money spent, the waste of time and tremendous impatience for them to get back to work,” Mr. Sears said. “There’s a sense we’ve been wasting time in the middle of an election campaign when the economy’s melting down and the government should have been at work.”

Worries about the economy appear to have overwhelmed all other issues. Issues that polls traditionally reveal as top priorities for Canadians — health care, for example — were barely mentioned this time.

“Any mention of the environment was heavily conditioned by economic anxiety,” Mr. Sears said. “And the only other issue that was mentioned unaided was Afghanistan and even there, it has been effected by the economy and the cost issue where people are saying we’ve done enough and spent enough and it’s time to go.”

Canadians appear to be “softening” in their opposition to the government running a deficit in order to stimulate economic growth, Mr. Sears said. However, they also demand fiscal discipline and a clear plan from their new government.

There is “obvious scar tissue” from the deficits of the eighties and early nineties, Mr. Sears said.

“People don’t want it the same as last time. They are saying you better have a plan, don’t give money for political reasons or regional favouritism, and, by the way, if you do have to go into deficit, it better be a short one, we want you to return to a balanced budget soon.”

There is also confidence in the stability of this country’s banking system and resistance to any government support similar to what has occurred in the United States. There was also concern about bank mergers or increased involvement by foreign banks in Canada.

“When you say ‘In times like these, don’t banks need to get bigger to get better?’ People say that bigger is worse, just look what happened to AIG,” Mr. Watt said, a reference to the American insurance company that needed more than $85-billion in support from the U.S. government.